Recapping Our Recent Performance Engineering Meetup

April 20, 2018

Once per quarter, the LinkedIn Performance Engineering meetup brings together engineers passionate about performance and efficiency from across the San Francisco Bay Area. The meetup is a great way for engineers to meet, share notes, and learn from each other on topics like performance measurements, monitoring, optimizations, and culture.

Last month, we hosted the 2nd LinkedIn Performance Engineering meetup at our Sunnyvale campus. About 100 attendees gathered for three hours after work to network and listen to speakers from Pinterest and LinkedIn talk about performance engineering. Thank you to everyone who attended for asking insightful questions and for helping make new connections. For updates on the next event, please follow the @LinkedInEng Twitter account and join the LinkedIn Performance Engineering group. Looking forward to seeing you all and plenty of new faces next time!

Sarah is a software engineer at Pinterest, which saw improved user engagement after the company switched to React and made its core webapp faster. This concretized the notion that performance is important for business, and Pinterest recently formed a central performance team dedicated to this issue, which Sarah is a member of. Her keynote talk detailed strategies on how to drive performance culture in a company, which is always a challenge in large organizations. Thank you Sarah for your great insights!

"The Mobile Crash Reporting Pipeline at LinkedIn" by Neville Carvalho

Neville is a Senior Software Engineer on LinkedIn’s Performance team. He is the lead engineer for LinkedIn’s Mobile Crash Reporting platform, which helps our mobile developers monitor crashes and exceptions for our members when they interact with our mobile apps. Crashes are bad for user experience and therefore important to be aware of to create a performant app. Neville gave a detailed look into how the crash reporting pipeline was built, the technologies and techniques used to deal with large amounts of data, and also how we make the app easy to use for our mobile developers.

“Slowing Down to Make LinkedIn Fast” by Mike Butkiewicz

Our last talk of the day was by Mike, who is a Senior Software Engineer on the LinkedIn Performance team. While there are many correlation studies showing how performance and business metrics are related, it is not easy to establish causal relationships. Mike talked about a recent A/B test we ran at LinkedIn, where we tried to understand how performance impacts business. He discussed how we conducted the test, as well as the results. While some results were obvious—e.g., performance does impact business!—we were able to quantify the impact, which helps justify why prioritizing performance is important. Through the testing, we also learned other interesting lessons, which we will try to publish in detail in a future blog post.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the hosts: Jee, Kate, Hibah and Vasanthi for organizing the meetup. And many thanks to the speakers, the volunteers from LinkedIn as well as all the attendees for making the meetup a success!